1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print management system and a print management method that allocate each print demand to one of multiple printing devices, which print an image on a medium like printing paper.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A print server for controlling multiple printers connected thereto has been proposed as a print management system (see ‘Print Alley System’ Minolta Co., Ltd. [retrieved on Mar. 12, 2003], the Internet <URL: http://ascii24.com/news/i/net/article/2000/04/06/608187-000.html>. This prior art print management system is designed to ‘allocate one print job to multiple printers to shorten the total output time of an original including a large number of pages’ and ‘automatically discriminate color pages from monochromatic pages included in a color/monochromatic original and separately output the color pages and the monochromatic pages to a color printer and a monochromatic printer’, so as to attain efficient print management.
When receiving multiple print jobs for printing an identical image multiple times, however, this prior art print management system may allocate the multiple print jobs of the identical image to different printers. Since the respective printers have different color reproduction properties, the reproduced colors of printed images on printing paper are slightly varied among the printers. Especially in the case of printing an identical photographic image with different printers, the customer often unsatisfactorily feels a subtle color difference between resulting prints.